Beautiful Lies

at “21.”

“She was quiet,” my mother remembered, “clearly intimidated by the evening. The box seats at the Met, Max’s special treatment at ‘21.’ I don’t know; I liked that about her. She didn’t take it for granted or have the usual air of pampered entitlement that so many of Max’s friends seemed to have.” She leaned heavily on the word friends, effectively communicating her disdain.

“Anyway, we thought, Well, maybe this is it. A real girlfriend; not one he’s hired— literally or figuratively.” My mother always has been a bit catty. “But then she was gone. We didn’t see her again. I asked about her, though that was a big no-no with Max. He said they didn’t share the same interests…or something vague like that. But it was more than that. You and I have talked about it, Ridley.”

I remembered our conversation about Esme and the things my mother had told me about Max then.

“A man like Max,” my father said, “so broken and lonely inside from all those years of abuse, from the things he’d endured and seen, can’t really love well. He was smart enough to know it. It’s why he never married.”

I thought of Max’s parade of call girls, his aura of loneliness, the way he always looked at my mother and father with that strange mixture of love and envy. The misshapen pieces of my life, the ones I had always ignored, were fitting themselves together.

“What are you telling me, Dad? That he knew Teresa Stone and allowed her child to be taken from her, anyway?”

My parents exchanged a look.

“Not exactly,” my mother said, looking down at her fingernails.

I managed to push myself upright with great difficulty. My father jumped up to help me. My head felt like a helium balloon; the room had an unpleasant spin to it.

“Max and Teresa went their separate ways,” my mother said. “Eventually she left the office, went on to other employment. And I never saw her again.” She released a heavy sigh and walked over to the window.

They were stalling. But I didn’t push. I’m not sure I was any more eager for them to get to the point than they were.

“But a couple of years later, she showed up at the Little Angels clinic with a baby. A little girl, almost two,” my father said. “I remembered her, but she didn’t remember me. I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I didn’t say anything about my relationship to Max. Over the next few months, there were incidents that caused me some alarm.”

“He broke Jessie’s arm. Christian Luna.”

My father nodded. “So you know.”

“He told me before he was killed.” I fought back tears and a wave of fatigue.

My father nodded with a heavy frown. “I had a conversation with her,” he said. “She promised me that Luna wouldn’t have access to her any longer and I let the incident go.”

“But you mentioned it to Max?”

My father shook his head. “No. I didn’t. Couldn’t have. It would have violated her doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“But he found out somehow,” I said.

“I don’t know, Ridley.” He shrugged, looked away from me. “All I know is that he showed up at our house a few weeks later. With little Jessie Stone.” He paused, put a hand on my arm. “With you.”

“With me?”

“Ridley,” my father said, his voice hoarse and his eyes getting glassy. “I’m not your biological father; that much you know. But neither is Christian Luna. He may have believed he was. Possibly Teresa led him to believe it.”

I shook my head. “Then who?”

“Ridley, honey,” my mother said, standing. “You’re Max’s daughter.”

I looked at her and saw that she was telling the truth. I heard Max’s voice in my head. Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done. And I started to cry because I finally knew what he meant.

Max came to them late in the evening, after midnight and unannounced. He came with a little girl in his arms. His daughter, he told them, by a woman he hadn’t seen in years. The little girl clung to him, wept quietly, her dark eyes wide, taking in all the unfamiliar sights and sounds.

“Oh, my God. This is Teresa Stone’s little girl,” my father said, taking her from Max’s arms. “I’ve treated her at the clinic.”

Max looked at him, his face blank, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “You knew I had a daughter?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “I didn’t realize she was your daughter, Max.”

Max drifted into the kitchen, rubbing his temples with his hands. He sat at the table. Little Jessie pulled at my father’s earlobe, made a light cooing noise.

“Something terrible has happened to Teresa. She’s dead, Ben. Murdered in her home.” His voice was little more than a whisper. The little girl started to cry and my mother took her into her arms, brought her into the other room to comfort her.

“What? When?” my father wanted to know, shocked.

“What difference does it make?” Max snapped.

“What difference does it make?” my father repeated, incredulous. “Max. What’s going on?”

“I can’t raise this child, Ben. You know that.”

“Wait a minute, Max. Let’s go back. How did you get this little girl?”

“The police called me. Teresa had my name on the birth certificate. I picked her up from Child Services a little while ago.”

“But that was a lie,” I said, interrupting my father. “Teresa Stone was murdered that night and Jessie was never found.”

He nodded. “You’re right. Max wasn’t on the original birth certificate. She’d left the father’s name blank. There was no way the police would have known to call Max. But by the time we realized that, it was too late.”

“What do you mean too late?”

My father shook his head. “We took you from Max that night. We accepted what he told us without question.”

“We’d been trying for eighteen months for a second child and your arrival just seemed like the answer to our prayers,” said my mother. She was sitting across the room from me now. It was dark; I couldn’t see her face.

“So when you figured out that Max had lied, that Jessie was a missing child, that no one knew who’d murdered her mother, you just kept quiet?”

“We fell in love with you right away. And by the time we realized that there was so much Max hadn’t told us, we’d already bent some rules,” my father said. He almost looked sheepish.

“What kind of rules?”

“With the help of some of Max’s connections, we processed you like a Project Rescue baby, like a child who’d been abandoned without documents. We created a new birth certificate and Social Security card.”

“And that’s how you became Ridley Jones,” said my mother with a smile, as if she were telling me the happy ending to a bedtime story.

“And Jessie Stone disappeared,” I said. “Until I saved Justin Wheeler from his fate.”

Nothing about their story rang true. There was a false note to it that could not be denied and there were so many questions. Like how could you just take a child in the night from your friend and ask no questions? Didn’t it seem like a huge coincidence that Jessie, Max’s daughter, would wind up being treated by Dr. Benjamin Jones, Max’s best friend? If Ben didn’t realize Jessie was Max’s daughter and Max’s name wasn’t on that birth certificate, how did Max find out about Jessie? And did he arrange to have Jessie taken that night? Did he arrange to have Teresa Stone murdered? But these questions seemed to dam up against one another, and for a minute I couldn’t bring myself to ask them. The answers were so potentially ugly.

They each had their eyes on me. And I wasn’t sure what to say to them.

“So you took this child, promised Max you’d raise her as your own. You falsified documents so that you could keep her true identity a secret from her for the rest of her life. You never asked any questions about what happened to her mother, how she died?”

“Well, we all thought Christian Luna had killed her. He was on the run. The child had no family except for